19 years ago today, I walked into the Harrisburg Hospital like I had done for at least 3x a week for the past 6 weeks. But today was going to be the day, the day I had anticipated but also dreaded. How can anyone dread the day their children would be delivered. I dreaded it because for the past 6 weeks I had been warned that the outcome of my twin pregnancy was not going to result in healthy babies. My girls were sick and from what I had been told was 80% of babies born with TTTS don't survive and of the ones who did, 2/3 of those would have severe mental or physical handicaps. I was dreading having to see my girls suffer and there was the real possibility one of them might die. I loved my girls! We hadn't planned this pregnancy and certainly never anticipated twins. But I loved them just as I loved our other 3 children and the thought of them being sick nor not coming home was devastating. .
TTTS is Twin to Twin Transfusion Syndrome. A condition that effects the placenta in identical twin pregnancies. A rare condition where the blood supply is shared. Instead of conjoined twins, think of a conjoined placenta. One twin typically feeds off the blood supply of the other twin. One is overloaded and the other is starved of blood and oxygen. As a result one twin grows much larger than the other twin and the bigger twin will accumulate a high volume of fluid around her, whereas the other twin "the stuck twin" does not have the amniotic fluid and will become shrink wrapped in her own sac and does not grow properly. At that time, there was high infant mortality. If caught early, selective abortion was the standard course of treatment, sacrificing one twin to save the other by severing the blood vessels that were joining the twins. I was not diagnosed until 24 weeks. I wouldn't have considered it, and I'm glad it wasn't suggested.
Once I was diagnosed I was sent to a high risk specialist that would treat me by tapping the amniotic fluid off the bigger twin to make room for the smaller twin to grow. It also would temporarily help equal out the blood flow. I would have 9 taps of the next 6 weeks resulting in over 13000cc of fluid being removed, about the same as 6 -2 liter bottles of soda.
October 2, 1995, after an emergency visit over the weekend for not feeling the twins move, he made the call to deliver the girls. All along there was this balancing act of deciding were they better off in the womb or out and when it became apparent that in the womb was no longer safe, they had to be delivered. When I arrived at my appointment, the Dr. felt that the ultrasound revealed that the membrane that separated the girls had ruptured, Up until this point each girl was in their own amniotic sac, and he thought the ultrasound showed that because of repeated taps maybe the membrane was ruptured. The concern was the girls would become tangled in each others cords, making my condition even more dangerous. So at 31 week, they scheduled my delivery.
